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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

So I guess I'll just keep posting work I've done...



So exciting! A t-shirt design I won, for The Frank Armitage Lecture Series event we had at UIC hosted by our Biomedical Visualization program. I get a whole $20 as a prize-oh, wait scratch that-due to 2 winners, the prize got pushed down to $10....Rolling in the dough.

School is kicking my hiney!


So school is hard. Go figure. Anyways, here is my latest assignment, line-only drawing showing the pancreas/spleen/colon relative to the surface and deep anatomy-no shading or rendering. I actually like this one, the simple graphic style is new to me.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

I do enjoy graphic design.




We had to develop a couple mock up web sites for any random website that we found disturbingly poorly designed. Although the website I drafted wasn't terrible, it certainly could use a face-lift. Here are my mock-up 'About' and 'Facial Prosthetic' pages.

Livers are gross! JK!



SO. Test number 2 out of the way-hard but I tried. I can't gauge how I think I did-I do however have a new drawing. I had to show an anomalous heart-it had an extra vein entering it from the liver. The emphasis was light on form, and although I apparently am shadow happy, I like the way it came out.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

I <3 you!

I held a human heart and lungs in my hands today. The heart was surreal. The lungs, when squeezed between my fingertips, felt like bubble wrap because of the air still trapped in them.

My first graphic design project!


My first graphic design project requiring me to use any set of data and create an image to represent that data. I chose obesity....well just take a look and see! Click to enlarge!

Thursday, October 2, 2008

I like your veins...

WOW. That test was nothing like what I, and basically everyone I talked to, thought it would be like. Wow. I wasn't expecting that at all.

However I did well so I'm happy. Hehe!

Monday, September 29, 2008

A word from the wise...

"Forget about grades . Most of you were in the top 5% of your undergraduate class or you wouldn’t be here. After the first quiz, half of you will be in the bottom half of this class. For some students this can be very traumatic. Let it go. Do the best you can, stay caught up and remember that you are not studying anatomy to get into med school. You’re already here - congratulations. You’re studying anatomy to learn the language of medicine and to care for patients. Later on you’ll have plenty of opportunities to pick up the things you miss or don’t fully understand here."


Saturday, September 20, 2008

Interesting!


Yo so!...
Apparently the new hip thing going on in my world are mini-med lectures. Mini-med lectures are lectures that are given at various colleges/universities that touch on a variety of topics related to science and medicine. For example, robots. Like, terminator 3-esque. Ok, not that advanced but still very cool nonetheless. I attended a mini-med lecture about a week ago on robot surgery and it has still stuck with me, enough to write about it here.

Let me go on. In going along with the worldy monopolies that we know and love, only one company in the world manufactures 'da Vinci Surgical Robotic Surgical System.' (The lowercase 'd' in 'da Vinci' is correct!) The surgeon sits at a computer-like hub station, a few feet from the patient and uses small handles to direct various robotic 'hands' in performing the surgery. The pros with such an extremely minimally invasive surgery ends up typically (TYPICALLY!) being the minimization of routine complications obtained from more classic open surgery such as recovery time, blood loss, lost surgery equipment (!) etc etc. There was actually a da Vinci system at the lecture for the public to use, and let me tell you it was saaaa-weet to sit there and pretend I was operating on a real human! Just kidding, it was in a lobby and we basically grabbed little rubber cones and played around with them. Actually, cool side note, the surgeon giving the lecture showed a video that a resident made when practicing her skills with the da Vinci robot hands by making an origami swan. Watch this thing, tis crazy. Ok so the video won't upload, so here it is if you want to watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Bjs99A0k0

But if you don't want to waste one minute, the point of the story is that at the end, one thinks this origami she made had to be, the size of one's fist or something, but it ends up being half the size of a penny! Crazy-town! The robotic hands are that capable even though they are centimeters wide! Go da Vinci!

But I digress. The cool thing about mini-med lectures is the opportunity for med students, health students, the public, the laymen, you name it, to be exposed to the frontiers of science in tons of various topics. They are also very affordable; the lecture series I am currently signed up for at Loyola amounted to $40 for 8 lectures, with one's commitement to how many one attends completely voluntary, but I found that most lectures at other schools end up costing nothing. (What the heck Loyola?) The schedules of the lectures are typically held once a week, for a couple months span at convenient evening hours. Anyways, forgive my da Vinci propaganda, it was just very cool! Moving on...

For Medical Illustration students in particular, the knowledge and coverage given to such a wide range of topics ends up being priceless for helping to pin down, or just even hint at possible fields one would potentially like to end up being in. Being that medical illustration has so many wide applications, it typically is hard to hone in on an area of medicine that one can spend their life's work on. That's why the lectures end up being so fascinating and valuable. This week's lecture is titled, 'The Bionic Human,' so no doubt that will be interesting as hell...but the following lectures touch on more common topics such as Alzheimer's and Genetics, and end up informing the public on the most current research in the field. I figured I'd share this information and if you happen to google 'Mini-med lectures,' you can surely find something reasonably close and affordable for you!

In the end, it supplies a lot more interesting job possibilities then illustrating textbooks. Yuck.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

That's right!


Da Vinci, 1492.

"I counsel you to not cumber yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind. If however notwithstanding you wish to demonstrate in words to the ears rather then to the eyes of men, let your speech be of things of substance or natural things, and do not busy yourself in making enter in the ears things that have to do with the eyes, for in this you will be far surpassed by the work of the painter."

It is the visual.
For more Da Vinci drawings, I urge you to go here: http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org/

I am honored...



I learned today that my female cadaver was 100 years old when she died from cardiac arrest, or some other cardiovascular problem.

100!

You go girl.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Just like the movies.















That's me on the left, by the way.

One of the most intense classes we as a class are required to take is Gross Anatomy.  That entails anatomy that is visible to the naked eye, no microscopes! no microbiology here!  This class therefore employs the use of cadavers to educate the Biomedical Visualization, Dental and Post-Baccalaureate students in the wonderful ways of the human body.  It is all very exciting. 

Now a little about these cadavers.  

1) All of the cadavers have donated their bodies to science (no strays, homeless, stolen or diseased people here!)  This was not always the case...Interesting side-note I read in Somethings Fierce and Fatal, by Joan Kahn, a book of creepy interesting tales.  
"Around the late 1800's, grave-robbing was a nation-wide horror.  Illinois, like many states, had no law against the stealing of bodies, although it had a statute against selling of corpses.  Under these conditions medical colleges were in a desperate fix, since they had to find cadavers for their classes to dissect.  There was only one thing to do, buy bodies from men who came to the back door at midnight with mysterious sacks which they exchanged for so much money down and no questions asked.  Ghouls, as the grave-robbers were called, had become the terror of rural communities, and friends and relatives of bereaved families patrolled cemeteries for nights after burials, shotguns in hand."
So that's good, no ghoulish sketchy exchanges.  All legit yo.

2) Your cadaver is either female or male, and they are given without preference.  "A number 1 on the tag means female.  A number 2 means male."  My table obtained a female.  The pro about this is that in my first lab dissection I had some mammary glands to work with, which was quite interesting to see.  

3)  Formaldehyde. "Formaldehyde-based solutions are used in embalming to disinfect and temporarily preserve human remains. It is the ability of formaldehyde to fix the tissue that produces the tell-tale firmness of flesh in an embalmed body. Whereas other heavier aldehydes produce a similar firming action none approaches the completeness of formaldehyde." 
It smells.  It sucks.  It makes you feel nauseous.  And it makes you hungry.  Yes, hungry.  Second year student comes up to me and says, "So were you starving after your first lab?"  I  say, "Yes, famished."  And she informs me that formaldehyde has the odd ability to make you hungry.
The chemical compound has that effect. Could be completely made up, but I've heard it from many, so eat something before you go in!  Catch 22 man...

3.  Latex gloves are required.  So are scalpels, obviously.  Both of which you must change about every 10-20 minutes....The blades obviously get dull quick, with the whole cutting dead skin and all, and the gloves make one's hands numb.  I walked out of my dissection lab, after 3 hours of dissecting the arm and forearm, and for 45 minutes afterwards my hands were tingly and my fingers numb.

4.  Bone boxes.  Boxes O' Bones.  At the beginning of our first lab, we were each, as a group, given a box full of human bones to study for tests/sketching assignments.  A human skellyton (excluding the skull and vertebrae) all for ourselves!  Excellent source of material EXCEPT for the fact that they are like, 50 years old, and one has no idea if the indentations and notches in the bones are natural, or just chips from being in a bone box with 15 other boney pieces, and lugged all over campus.  Still, sa-weet!

5.  Dissecting is awesome.  You stare at someone's armpit (axilla region) and all of a sudden 4 hours fly by.  Like when I paint.  No concept of time, and it makes you look at your body (and humans in general) in a new light.  Laying in bed the other day, I started visualizing where all my arteries, veins and muscles lie.  Feeling for my external occipital proturbance (the back of your skull) I felt like a scientist, a doctor, a medical illustrator... which could only mean good things...

And lastly, a terrible dissection misshapes that I thought would be nice to share.

1. "A little blob of cadaver juice splashed in my mouth last week when my labmate's chisel thwacked the wrong way. Note to self: close mouth when near cadaver.

Put me right off my supper, it did."

Thursday, August 28, 2008

What I learned today.




As an 'illustrator' one must become, how can we say, "good" at illustrating.  Obvi.  Therefore, one needs to take classes such as the one I am currently enrolled in as a freshman Biomedical Illustration student.  My class, Anatomical Illustration, helps simplify the more correct and scientific forms of recording visual information, as to capture the most realistic, yet aesthetically pleasing image.  This requires art supplies.  This then entails the not-so-fun trip to the always-a-zoo store we all know and love, Pearl Art Supplies.  I swear, you would think their employees have lived within a Pearl-esque environment their whole lives.   

Moving on, in this class I learned the most FASCINATING thing I have learned in a while, sadly.  Now follow me here.  Throughout art history, there has always been a majority style of painting that never really hit the mark in terms of a truly realistic portrayals of humans, fabrics and everything else these artists thought to paint.  Monkeys, fruit, you name it.  However, a contemporary artist that you probably have heard of, David Hockney, started noticing from his viewing that things changed rather quickly, during the 1400's, when artist's rendition of their subjects become eerily photographic in their highly realistic form.  We're talking, photographic quality.  This change occurred in some regions within a 20-30 year time frame.  So obviously, there was something else that had to contribute to this fantastical turn for the better (or rather worse, depending on how you look at it.) 
Throughout his massive research, Hockney eventually found out that artists were secretly employing a mirror, and eventually a lens, to reflect an image of their subject onto a canvas behind them in a darkened room, which shown on the canvas upside down and backwards.  The image was as crisp and accurate as a photo, so all the artist had to do what trace the image, highlights and perfect details and all, onto their canvas, and voila!  Instant art!  Hockney realized this and confirmed his hypothesis based on the odd 'backwardness' of many of the paintings he saw.  He noticed that in many paintings, most subjects, or at least a large majority, were left-handed, had large ill proportioned body parts in the background, and the background itself seemed to pop in and out of focus in random areas.  ALL explained and corrected if one was to flip the painting vertically, which would portray the actual set up before the artist used the camera/lens, and began to paint.
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Why were there no riots, people screaming from their rooftops about the falsity of all we have thought about realistic renderings of the past?  The great masters....were they great masters, or just highly skilled draftsmen, painting their masterpieces under the false pretense of freehand observation? 
The fact is, this is still a highly controversial topic....some people agree, some disagree strongly, as expected.  Who wants to destroy all memories and revere we as a culture has developed for such influential teachers and master painters?  After learning this, after my innocent childhood was screwed and falsified with the thoughts that artists such as Caravaggio and other renaissance artists as incredible magicians at being able to render such shockingly amazing details, I have to turn a new critical eye to those paintings and view them with a new perspective of judgement. 

For a more in-depth article on the highly controversial topic, click the following article below.




An extra serving of me please?!

Chello. If you are an individual who:
a. Likes science.
b. Likes art, but never really was interested in the more modern type of art, but was still pretty good at many artistic endeavors.
c. Enjoys medical oddities.
d. Reads dark comedies.
e. Thinks the human body is incredible.
f. Doesn't mind sick and disgusting things, i.e blood, guts, death and everything in between.
g. Loves Bigfoot.
h. Doesn't love Bigfoot, either way.
Well, me too. This blog is an attempt at demonstrating, really, what goes on in one's quest of becoming a medical illustrator, and talks about the trials and tribulations that comes along with every aspect of graduate school for one going into a not so average field.
Our Motto: Where the Living Learn from the Dead.